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March 31, 2009

Forgive me for once again plugging the April 4th debut of Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-Hen, the King of Cartoons, but I just had an observation to make. The new Pilder sequence makes no sense. And that is awesome.

You have to understand the way Mazinger should work. It's implausible, sure, but for Mazinger-land it makes some immediate sense. The motionless robot gets lifted on an elevator up out of a pool, and Kouji gets in his Hover Pilder, flies up into the robot's head, and lowers it in, yelling PILDER OOOON.

In Shin Mazinger, no thank you, sir: the robot is posing in time with Kouji's yell even though there is clearly nobody inside it to control it (note the empty space where the Pilder should be). Then the Pilder On bit follows, except Kouji flies up into the air and then just drops while Mazinger holds its head in place to accept its own robotic brain. And then it turns on!

I love that Imagawa's taken something that made little sense, and instead of trying to explain it or simply changing it to something explainable, embraced the true spirt of the thing and made it make less sense. Way less. Get hype.

I was reading up on the state of the internet when an "advertisement" caught my eye. To put it quickly, the Moero Downhill Night games are a series of porn racing games being brought to market by the always-creepy J-List under their Peach Princess label. (Please note that none of this is even a little worksafe.) You will note that as you flip through the description that the whole act of racing is curiously omitted. I wonder why! Luckily, one of the three games' trailers actually opts to show some gameplay and, well, when you see it you'll know why I had to make this post.

Stunning! As you can see, we're all the way in the beginning of the Playstation era with this: the graphics are only a notch or two past Cosmic Race, and you could argue that Cosmic Race has the better vehicle models, couldn't you? Lesson learned: you can put moe on absolutely anything and sell a couple of copies (see also SNK's current April Fool's prank).

March 28, 2009

The guys and I have all rented out a summer house, and it's late, I'm in a sleeping bag, and there's a thunderstorm raging outside. A real slasher movie situation. As such, one of my friends wakes me up and tells me "Dude, I hear a noise." I don't hear a noise but I decide to follow him with grave urgency anyway, at each turn answering "Dude, I hear a noise!" with a false nod. We turn the last corner, the lights flip from blue to yellow, and we freeze: in front of us is a huge, widening staircase with a red, gold-lined carpet draped down it. As I hit the bottom of the stairs, we realize that we're in the waiting room of an impossible megachurch: a gigantic pipe organ is visible in the far distance, but there seems to be no end to the rows of pews beyond the threshold.

I suddenly remember that we are the finest members of the Earth Federation Police Department, and there is a very serious arrest that we need to make. I pass through the threshold, look to my left. Sayla Mass shoots me a look of intense disdain. I tell her it's not my fault. "You know there's nothing we can do about this. It's not like I want to." Her face tightens up, her disdain clearly intensifying. "Honestly... on a day like this?" I don't know what kind of day this is, but the remark stings. I know this is a bad day for this. "Look, I'm sorry, okay?" Nothing but a stare. I walk away. There's a man practicing on a piano in front of us, and a familiar blonde man watches intently, as though checking for errors.

"Yo, Char!" Char Aznable is wearing the suit and sunglasses he wore the time he hit a bar to see Garma Zabi on TV. He turns and smiles at the mention of his name. I come up and tell him, like a friendly teacher to a delinquent student, "You know what this is about. We have to go." He waves it off. "Yeah, don't worry about it." And so, as Sayla Mass glares like death at me, I cuff a docile Red Comet and lead him off. "You know," I tell him as we climb the stairs, "if it wasn't for this whole thing going on, we'd probably be buddies." "Maybe so," he replies. As we walk, I see a faint, auburn glow coming from above my head. I reach up towards my head, and as I hit something soft and puffy, I realize that I am Amuro Ray. At this exact moment, I wake up.

If anything, I'm kind of surprised that was the first time I ever dreamed that I was in Gundam.

March 26, 2009

Haggle Man 3 is the final game, the centerpiece of the whole thing, and a very good joke: the formerly squat and adorable Haggle Man goes dark and menacing, in a transition mirroring Mega Man going to the Mega Man X series. The old game design is completely out the window, replaced with a straightforward action game that takes serious influence from Ninja Gaiden and Metroid. The Metroid comes from the huge level maps and ability to upgrade your character: the Ninja Gaiden comes from the shot at a cinematic presentation (cutscenes and all!) and the fact that Indies is really evil and liked those fucking birds from NG so much they're flying around for most of the game, knocking you off platforms and into pits. You know the birds I'm talking about.

The game is very short, but what levels exist are both huge and rather impressively designed, loaded with secrets. You're going to want to poke around a lot, as there are really strong items that can very easily be passed over. This is probably the most-liked game of the lot, and it deserves the title, but I can't find much to say about it. It's really not too far off from latter-day Castlevania.

That about covers them! Most I've ever done for this blog in one day, I'd say. Do buy Retro Game Challenge: we're all hoping for an English version of the sequel, which has been out in Japan for a little while and is said to be quite amazing. On a longer shot, we're all really hoping for Game Center CX, the TV show, to be localized by somebody or another. The Japanese rights holder has been trying to get somebody to publish, but given the amount of time they've been shopping it around, it doesn't look like anybody is interested. Well, they're wrong: the show is great fun, amazes everybody who watches it, and quite a lot of it has been fansubbed by TV-Nihon. The subbed episodes are all also up on Youtube at the moment, if you look for them. The DVD market is probably long gone for a show like this, though: they should just look into ad-supported digital distro if you ask me. But that's what I say every time!

Guadia Quest is where Indies started to think real big: this one is a six-hour RPG (your time to finish may vary). It's also another sticking point for a lot of people, and it presents a serious challenge to the designers. What do people want to avoid in a Japanese RPG? Grind. What do the early Japanese RPGs consist entirely of? Grind. So they make the dungeon-crawling game, in all its monotonous glory, but they smooth it out.

The game is basically Dragon Quest 2, with the three party members-- one a fighter, one a cleric, the last a mage-- except you can recruit a fourth party member: an AI-controlled monster who fights by your side. That's about it for innovation: like the entire DQ franchise, this game is archaic and proud of it. Wrestle with inadequate Dragon Quest menus! Never know what an item or spell does until you've bought it or cast it! Suffer!

I have a flash cart in my GBA slot with NES ROMs on it and I've been playing a lot of Dragon Warrior. This game is cake compared to Dragon Warrior. I'm not going to say it's somehow free of drudgery: if you got rid of the drudgery there wouldn't be anything left. But the game is a lot more forgiving. There's a welcome save-anytime feature that makes it very unlikely for you to lose much progress after a death, an easy way to warp out of dungeons at any time, an autobattle option, and a very generous experience curve. At the outset you really have to work for your levels and first set of equipment, but once you're strong enough to hang out in the dungeon you get a lot stronger, and fast. The loot you find in the dungeons comes nearly as fast, and a couple hours in, you're steamrolling. Past the beginning, I can't say I really felt like I was in danger at any point.

Of course, Indies realizes that this game is a bit much to take on, so like the other games, you can cheat to the end with a hidden passage that takes you to a man who will show you the ending credits after asking you ten times or so if you really, seriously want to see the credits. You won't see the ending of the story, though, so if you want to know what happens... actually, the game telegraphs itself all the way through, with even a hint on the title screen. You should be able to figure it out.

Star Prince is probably the game that plays it straightest with its influences: this is Star Soldier. Hudson's classic vertical shooter Star Soldier was a lot more popular in Japan than it was here (a LOT), so where we might-- were we Western developers making a faux-80's videogame collection-- stick in Contra, a Japanese dev goes with Star Soldier. Gameplay is nearly identical: same weapons, same big stages, same tons of ground targets to blast away at for points. There are even the very specific conditions that the player can fulfill for extra points: blowing up certain targets at just the right time and so on. The gameplay twist here is the reflector: hold down the fire button as opposed to tapping it rapidly, and you get a shield that absorbs bullets and spits out a bomb, like Giga Wing (but not like Guwange). This eases up the traditional bullet-dodging gameplay of a 2D shooter, and under heavy fire you can just hold down the fire button for as long as you need to, as long as you don't crash into an enemy ship.

In an extended nod to the kid culture that surrounded Star Soldier, there are gags in the story mode about a Takahashi Meijin equivalent, and little Arino quickly buys an autofire controller for use with the game, so that you don't have to mash on B at the speed of light to get anywhere. Unfortunately, the autofire, when used with the laser weapon, which fires as fast as you can press the button, effectively breaks the game: bosses are killable in two or three seconds with the autofire laser, and it doesn't get much harder as the game goes on. Of course, you can ignore autofire and do things the old-fashioned way, but you're gonna have to earn every one of those shots and it is not pleasant. There's a reason the genre went to autofire. It just hadn't gone to autofire at this point in time! Personally, my DS's buttons have taken too much abuse already to want to do that to them. My A button is actually noticeably lower than the others. Plus my R button just broke today, and I don't even press it that much! I can't afford that kind of danger.

I love Rally King, fuck you guys! It's great! Everybody seems to hate this one, particularly because you have to play what is almost exactly the same game twice, with a "rare" version of Rally King appearing later in the game. Maybe people don't like it because it's of a genre that's been dead for ten or more years now: the 2D, overhead racing game. That's right, you drive from above. None of that fancy Pole Position business here.

Rally King is probably the hardest of the games to settle into: I'll be the first to admit that. It's the first time, even, that any of these games is truly difficult (it unlocks before Haggle Man 2). I know I didn't play too many overhead racing games as a kid, and when you start out you'll be crashing into walls and dying over and over again. But I found, long after the challenges were done, that I settled into Rally King beautifully. The key is understanding a Mario Kart-style drift mechanic that, when properly used, allows the player to fling the car around the course much, much faster than simply holding down the gas. The tracks are really well-designed too, with a lot of obstacles and shortcuts--some obvious and others less so-- that keep things interesting.

Rally King SP, meanwhile, is a joke on the ultra-rare ramen tie-in Gradius cart that was given away to lucky kids: just like with the Gradius cart, young Arino won his copy of Rally King SP. Like that version of Gradius, the only obviously different thing about Rally King SP is the heavy product placement for cup noodles and Gamefan Magazine, RGC's fake game mag and no relation to the original. It's a little harder. The difference is really negligible. Would have been good as a secret, but as a main game selection it just looks cheap. Not that Retro Game Challenge isn't packed with value! Buy it today, kids.

Robot Ninja Haggle Man, to be precise. Haggle Man is perhaps the most ambitious thing going on in Retro Game Challenge: a full-scale fake franchise. The setup is a little Mega Man, but the game itself is a more action-oriented riff on Door Door, a game Arino has himself challenged. Run around a stage, using the doors to hide from and kill enemies, until the boss appears. Beat him, and the door to the next stage appears. The doors are all lettered and colored (same-colored doors all open and close at the same time, making for a lot of opportunities to kill from afar) and there are little tricks you can do by opening the doors in certain orders. It's a lot more fun than it sounds like!

Haggle Man 1 and 2 are like Super Mario Brothers 1 and (Japanese) Super Mario Brothers 2: the core mechanics are identical in the sequel, but the levels and enemies are far harder to deal with. Smooth the graphics out a little bit with some shading effects and you've got a sequel! It'd suck, except it's kinda funny. The look of the game does a really good job of emulating the shift between Mega Man 1 and 2, even ripping that boss screen effect from MM2. Both these games are really short (even with the midgame twist), but you might spend a bit more time on Haggle Man 2, which is fairly tough.

Haggle Man 3, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal. We'll get to it.

Retro Game Challenge is a DS game that's gotten a little bit of buzz lately: it's a compilation of faux-retro videogames that were made recently, but are all designed to look and play like children of the 80s. A friend called it a "lost childhood simulator." It was also, in its original Japanese release, the game version of a favorite Japanese show of mine, Game Center CX. I've talked about it before, but why not talk about it again?

The Game Center CX TV show revolves around comedian Shinya Arino, whose job is apparently to beat old videogames. Every episode, Arino walks into the same room, sits down with his staff and an old game, and he doesn't stop until he wins (or the game destroys his will to live). Arino is not good at videogames: that's not what this show is about. If anything, I get the feeling he plays sloppily on purpose to please the crowd a little bit. This show wouldn't work if Arino wasn't screwing up all the time, being bewildered by the games' ridiculous demands, and directly stating what is going on onscreen like he was Tekkaman.

This isn't to say that they go easy on him. The first two seasons are an avalanche of some of history's cruelest videogames, from the Japanese Super Mario Brothers 2 to the cruel parody Takeshi's Challenge to The Secret of Atlantis, Sunsoft's "Mario-killer" which wasn't quite as popular due to the game being a slow descent into the mouth of Hell. Arino doesn't entertain people by getting all angry and screaming at the screen and throwing shit like they do on Youtube, though. Arino's got a humble, unassuming charm. He takes everything in stride, and the approach really makes you sympathize with him as he overcomes these insane challenges from the past. All the episodes are up on Youtube! Go try it out, all my friends love it.

In the videogame, on the other hand, Arino is an evil polygonal head who, having lost at all current-generation videogames ever, has transported you back in time to take on the challenges of the 1980s. Like Arino on the show, you're forced to play a collection of games with certain goals in mind. Unlike Arino, though, the games aren't excruciating challenges, and the tasks you need to perform are child's play. If you want to rush through the challenges and just finish the game without paying any in-depth attention to the games themselves, this game will last you a day. But you'd be cheating yourself, because these new old videogames that developer Indies Zero has made are so good: they fit perfectly into their era, but the more painful elements of the old games have largely been smoothed over for people who'd rather not play Dragon Warrior 2 at its original pace. Aside from the final long-form games, all the games are pretty short-burst games that can be beaten in twenty minutes to half an hour.

In the main mode, you play the games on the top DS screen and have assistance on the bottom from a young Arino, a collection of fake old game magazines about fake old videogames, and a note-taking option on the touchscreen so you can write down codes and such. The two-screen functionality is really well-handled: you can do all this stuff as you play. It really completes the childhood experience to flip through a magazine, write down a cheat code, and then return to your game. Also, little Arino (here dubbed by Bang Zoom, and voiced by who is probably an uncredited Yuri Lowenthal) sure don't know how to shut up.

Let's talk about the videogames, though! Cosmic Gate is a very simple Galaga knockoff: the main design change is that the really easy-mode double ship has been replaced by an easy (but not THAT easy) power-up weapon. Also, unlike its contemporaries, Cosmic Gate has a definite end at 64 stages, and hidden warps throughout the levels so you can get through a little more quickly. The difficulty curve is pretty admirable: instead of simply moving faster, enemy patterns actually get harder and fire more bullets. By the end, you're going to be doing some serious bullet-dodging that Galaga never attempted. Since 64 is a huge amount of stages, the game breaks it up with bonus rounds where you blow up asteroids. It still drags a bit, particularly if you are playing for a high score and making sure not to warp. Not a hard game to beat: a secret usable only in the story mode lets you beat the game in about two minutes, but if you don't want to cheat, the game supplies continues and a generous amount of lives. I was able to coast through in one credit. There is a hard mode, but I haven't tried it yet. Not bad, but maybe 32 stages next time, guys.

I'm splitting the rest up into individual posts, because it will be way too long.

March 25, 2009

You know how it is. Sometimes you're looking at the game column or something Justin Sevakis wrote, and your eye wanders. The anime fan section of the internet--yours truly included -- has been collectively laughing its ass off at the recent ad for Sakura-Con '09. Everything you (editor's note: I assume all my readers to be Riding Bean-esque sunglass-wearing badasses) probably can't stand about anime fans is carefully condensed into thirty seconds of blistering pain. People have parodied the hell out of the ad, particularly the goofy goth kid with the black lipstick who yells "GIROOGAMESH!" LittleKuriboh of Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged fame recently tore it one in grand style.

So naturally, ANN took it really, really seriously. You guys, you guys! This makes anime fans look like a bunch of embarrassing kids who worship Japan and all its products-- including apparent Honorary Japanese Swedes Smile.dk-- unquestioningly in some kind of bizarre parallel-universe minstrel show! Isn't this bad for our collective image as anime fans? Sure it is. But the image was bad to begin with, and it has a lot to do with the people you see at anime cons, who are, well... just like this ad.

The majority of people who have ever enjoyed a Japanese cartoon or comic in their life aren't the people in these ads. I don't even think the majority of people who would call themselves "fans" are. Japanese cartoons do not magically turn you TV-commercial obnoxious. You are not going to catch anything from this Dirty Pair DVD.

But then there are conventions. Conventions are a big leap out into the deep end of geekdom. If you're there, whether you're cosplaying or doing a panel or just chillin', you're already up a level whether you want to be or not. Doesn't it make sense, then, that many of these larval-stage congoers are young and enthusastic to the point of exasperating everybody around them? Doesn't it follow that a TV ad for an anime convention-- remember, aimed at bringing in as many people as possible-- should embrace that character and target that audience?

'Cause I dunno if you heard, dear reader, but you and I are the minority. We shouldn't be surprised by this. We shouldn't be shocked, and there's really no use being offended unless you define yourself by a stupid TV ad. In this case, I suggest you petition for a more sensitive piece where a pair of thoughtful enthusiasts wearing Golgo 13-branded monocles discuss-- passionately but with gentlemanly restraint-- the relative merits of Tezuka and Tatsumi over a bit of Boss or UCC coffee. Does anybody who isn't already an anime fan actually give a shit about this ad, that we're all sitting here pulling our hair out about its possible interpretations by others? Are the people in your life seriously so silly that they'd honestly think less of you because they found out you think pictures of robots or moe girls or fabulous men are cool? I'm not worried that anybody will ever see me as that, because I know I'm not that, and so does everybody who knows me.

Please keep in mind that I still can't stand this ad. It's irritating and I'd wish it didn't exist if it weren't so hysterical. But it does, and I understand how and why it exists, and that is a tiny bit sad. So what is left to do but laugh?

I also saw a persistent response in the comments along the lines of "oh, this is a parody, you guys just don't get it." Wrong. This is not parody. It's damn near a documentary. Tokyo Breakfast is a parody. If this ad had a bunch of Wapanese dressed like dime-store ninjas with headbands that said NINJA in big letters on them, and they all spoke entirely in pidgin otaku-Japanese-- like "SUSHI DESU!! ANIME SUGOI YAOI KAWAII DE ARIMASU!" or something completely insane and ridiculous, then yes, it would be parody.

Matter of fact, I'll write that ad right now and we'll all get together and film it. Who's with me?